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Is Creating a Perfectly Spherical Prince Rupert's Drop Possible?

2024-12-14
Is Creating a Perfectly Spherical Prince Rupert's Drop Possible?

An engineering question explores the possibility of creating a perfectly spherical Prince Rupert's drop. Prince Rupert's drops are glass objects formed by dripping molten glass into cold water, their unique internal stresses making them incredibly tough except at the tail. The article discusses how, theoretically, in a zero-gravity environment by controlling the cooling rate and removing the effects of gravity, a spherical Prince Rupert's drop could be made, but significant practical challenges remain.

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(engineering.stackexchange.com)
Tech Prince Rupert's Drop Glass Material Science

Qubes OS Unveils Secure PDF Conversion Tool

2024-12-12

The Qubes OS team has developed a novel security mechanism for converting untrusted PDFs into trusted ones. Leveraging Qubes' Disposable VMs, the process isolates PDF parsing within a secure container. The PDF is converted to a simple RGB image representation, then back to a PDF. This approach effectively mitigates attacks from malicious PDFs; even if parsing fails, the resulting PDF will only be a corrupted image, posing no system threat. This innovation significantly enhances Qubes OS security, allowing users to handle PDFs from the web or email more safely.

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(blog.invisiblethings.org)
Tech secure PDF conversion disposable VMs

Windows 2: The Almost-Forgotten OS That Could Have Been the Last

2025-01-01

This article dives deep into the untold story of Windows 2.0, an often-overlooked chapter in the history of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It explores the technical limitations of the era, the intense competition from systems like VisiOn and Apple Lisa, and the internal struggles within Microsoft that shaped the development of Windows 2.0. While lacking in abundant software, Windows 2.0 displayed surprising features like mouse support and basic multitasking. Despite nearly becoming a dead end, its lessons proved crucial for the subsequent success of Windows 3.0. The narrative weaves together technical details, historical context, and anecdotes from the development process, painting a compelling picture of this pivotal moment in computing history.

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(www.ninakalinina.com)
Tech Windows history OS development

Breaking Change: List API Filter Overhaul with Nested Expressions

2025-05-25
Breaking Change: List API Filter Overhaul with Nested Expressions

The List API has undergone a significant update, now supporting nested and complex filter expressions. This is a breaking change requiring users to update their client libraries. All clients have been updated to support the new syntax and assist in constructing nested filters. For raw HTTP users, the filter format changed from col[ne]=val to filter[col][$ne]=val, following QS conventions. For example, excluding a value range [v_min, v_max]: ?filter[$or][0][col][$gt]=v_max&filter[$or][1][col][$lt]=v_min. A new Swift client implementation has been added. The release version is now shown in the admin dashboard with a link to the release page. Dependencies have also been updated.

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(github.com)
Development API Update Filters Nested Expressions

Microplastics Found in Human Brains: A Growing Threat?

2025-02-15
Microplastics Found in Human Brains: A Growing Threat?

A recent study revealed the presence of significant microplastic levels in human brains. These microplastics, entering the brain via the bloodstream, are potentially linked to various illnesses. The article highlights the environmental and health dangers of our reliance on plastic, pointing to the polluting nature of its production and its persistence in the environment. While the US government has taken steps to regulate harmful chemicals in plastic production, the impact remains limited. The author urges accountability for the petrochemical industry rather than solely blaming consumers.

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(www.scientificamerican.com)
Tech environmental pollution

Kashmir's Frozen EV Dream: How Cold Weather Is Killing the Electric Revolution

2025-09-15
Kashmir's Frozen EV Dream: How Cold Weather Is Killing the Electric Revolution

Bashir Ahmad, an apple farmer in Kashmir, sold his wife's gold jewelry to buy an electric three-wheeler, hoping to revolutionize his business. However, winter arrived and brought his dreams crashing down. Extreme cold drained 60% of the vehicle's battery overnight, stranding tons of fruit and leaving customers frustrated. This highlights a global crisis: EVs lose significant range in cold temperatures, despite billions spent on technological advancements. The problem is particularly acute in cold regions with poor infrastructure, like Kashmir, where the $2 billion apple industry is significantly impacted. The story raises questions about the practicality and environmental impact of widespread EV adoption in cold climates, showcasing the need for cold-weather-optimized technology and supporting infrastructure before a true electric revolution can take place.

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(restofworld.org)
Tech Cold Weather Performance

Punched in the Stomach: A Surreal High-Paying Job

2025-02-18
Punched in the Stomach: A Surreal High-Paying Job

A programmer stumbles upon a job perfectly matching his skills, except for one bizarre detail: getting punched in the stomach by his boss daily. The high salary and benefits outweigh his concerns. The job, as surreal as it sounds, becomes his reality. He adapts, contemplates the meaning of work and life, and eventually quits, embarking on a new chapter. The story explores themes of absurdity, corporate culture, and self-discovery.

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(www.scottsmitelli.com)
Misc absurdity life purpose

C++26 to Feature Compile-Time Reflection: Goodbye Boilerplate, Hello High Performance

2025-06-22

Herb Sutter has announced that C++26 will include compile-time reflection, a game-changer for C++ development. Compile-time reflection provides access to a program's own structure, enabling tasks like enumerating a class's methods. This is particularly impactful for libraries like simdjson, allowing high-speed conversion between custom data structures and JSON strings without boilerplate code. The article demonstrates generating efficient SQL insert statements using compile-time reflection, reducing boilerplate and improving code reusability and safety. While the code might look complex, the performance gains and code simplification are significant.

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(lemire.me)
Development Compile-time Reflection

Git Shallow Clones: Performance Pitfalls and the Depth 2 Optimization

2025-02-12
Git Shallow Clones: Performance Pitfalls and the Depth 2 Optimization

Git shallow clones (`--depth 1`) can significantly impact performance on the first push. This is because shallow clones artificially mark some commits as root commits, preventing the server from using optimizations and requiring the transmission of the entire commit snapshot. Using `--depth 2` deep clones, however, preserves a complete commit history, allowing the server to utilize optimizations even on the first push, reducing data transfer and significantly improving push speed. Subsequent pushes are unaffected.

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(stackoverflow.com)
Development shallow clone

Modest: A Lua Library for Musical Harmony

2025-02-02
Modest: A Lua Library for Musical Harmony

Modest is a robust Lua library for musical harmony, offering Chord, Note, and Interval objects that handle a wide range of chords, from simple major/minor to complex jazz chords. It features flexible string parsing for chord identification, transposition capabilities, and individual note retrieval. Easily installable via LuaRocks or manual compilation, Modest supports Lua 5.4 and LuaJIT and avoids polluting the global namespace. Its core functionality, including chord identification, transposition, note extraction, and interval calculations, provides efficient tools for music software development.

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(github.com)
Development Music

BorgBackup: Efficient and Secure Deduplicating Archiver

2025-07-20

BorgBackup (Borg) is an open-source deduplicating archiver combining compression and authenticated encryption for space-efficient storage and robust security. It supports various compression algorithms (lz4, zstd, zlib, lzma) and offers easy installation across multiple platforms (Linux, macOS, BSD, etc.). Backed by a large and active community, Borg provides mountable backups for convenient access and, crucially, remember to always check your backups!

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(www.borgbackup.org)
Development

Reduced Antibiotic Use Linked to Rising Honeybee Death Rates in Canada

2025-07-30
Reduced Antibiotic Use Linked to Rising Honeybee Death Rates in Canada

A new study reveals a surprising finding: despite stricter regulations on antibiotics in Canadian beekeeping, honeybee death rates are climbing. Researchers discovered that reducing antibiotic use, contrary to expectations, led to a significant increase in overwintering mortality, suggesting a possible dependence on antibiotics. Air pollution, specifically nitrogen dioxide, was also identified as a contributing factor to colony loss. The study highlights the complex interplay between bee health, antibiotic use, and environmental factors, emphasizing the need for a 'One Health' approach incorporating antibiotic alternatives and addressing environmental pollutants to safeguard bee populations and global food security.

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(news.uoguelph.ca)
Tech honeybee mortality

CRISPR Gene Editing: From Bacterial Immunity to Human Therapies

2025-06-19
CRISPR Gene Editing: From Bacterial Immunity to Human Therapies

Victoria Gray's successful treatment for sickle cell anemia using CRISPR gene editing marks a new era for gene therapy. This article delves into the diverse CRISPR systems, including Cas9, Cas12, Cas13, base editors, and prime editors, explaining their mechanisms, advantages, disadvantages, and clinical applications. Evolving from a natural bacterial defense mechanism, CRISPR technology is now widely used in disease treatment, agriculture, and sustainability efforts, but faces challenges such as high costs and off-target effects. The discovery and improvement of more novel gene editing tools will further drive the development of this field.

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(www.asimov.press)
Tech gene therapy

Interstellar Navigation: New Horizons Uses Stellar Parallax

2025-07-07
Interstellar Navigation: New Horizons Uses Stellar Parallax

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, hurtling out of our solar system, offers a unique perspective on the Milky Way. The stars' positions appear significantly different from Earth's view. Scientists have leveraged this parallax effect to achieve the first-ever interstellar navigation using stellar positions. By comparing New Horizons' images of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 with data from the Gaia space telescope, researchers calculated the probe's galactic location. While less precise than the Deep Space Network, this method offers advantages at greater distances from Earth, enabling autonomous operation without relying on radio signals from our solar system. Future improvements could significantly enhance accuracy, paving the way for future interstellar missions.

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(www.newscientist.com)
Tech interstellar navigation stellar parallax

433: A Font That Replaces Text with Dots

2025-07-29
433: A Font That Replaces Text with Dots

To mask text in Ensō's Coffeeshop Mode, the author created a font called 433 that replaces all non-whitespace characters with dots. This post details the creation process, covering font design principles, Unicode encoding, and WOFF2 compression. The author shares challenges and solutions encountered, along with insights into fonts, Unicode, and multilingual support. The project stemmed from a need to handle diverse writing systems among the app's rapidly growing user base.

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(untested.sonnet.io)
Development Coffeeshop Mode

Designing Delightful Apps for Kids: Lessons from Kidz Fun Art

2025-07-29
Designing Delightful Apps for Kids: Lessons from Kidz Fun Art

This article details the lessons learned over four years developing Kidz Fun Art, a tablet-optimized drawing app for children. The author highlights unique challenges and solutions for designing child-friendly apps, including minimizing text, co-locating tools with objects, simplifying interactions, easy error correction, knowing when to involve adults, reducing the need for fine motor skills, addressing palm rejection, and incorporating delightful design elements. The author also stresses ethical monetization strategies, privacy concerns, and preventing children from directly spending money.

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(shaneosullivan.wordpress.com)
Development Child App Design

Medieval Games: How Video Games Shape Our Understanding of the Middle Ages

2025-02-28

Robert Houghton's new book, *The Middle Ages in Computer Games*, explores how video games shape our understanding of the medieval period. Reaching a massive audience, games both draw upon and reshape perceptions of the Middle Ages. The book analyzes how games incorporate medieval elements in combat, religion, technology, and race, revealing the impact of games on historical understanding and their influence on modern culture. It's a must-read for medievalists and gamers alike.

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(www.medievalists.net)
Game medieval games cultural studies

JWST Detects Hydrogen Cyanide and Acetylene in Brown Dwarf Atmosphere – A First

2025-02-28
JWST Detects Hydrogen Cyanide and Acetylene in Brown Dwarf Atmosphere – A First

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made a groundbreaking discovery! An international team of astronomers, using JWST, has for the first time detected hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and acetylene (C2H2) in the atmosphere of a nearby brown dwarf binary system designated WISE J045853.90+643451.9. Published on the arXiv preprint server, the finding reveals a cloud-free, molecule-rich atmosphere. The discovery showcases the power of JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) Medium Resolution Spectrometer (MRS) in characterizing cool brown dwarfs. Future studies will investigate HCN and C2H2 in more detail and determine if these species are present in other similarly cool brown dwarfs.

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(phys.org)
Tech Brown Dwarf Atmospheric Detection

10 Years of Hardware Startup Lessons Condensed into a 300+ Page Book

2025-03-18

An engineer with over a decade of experience across multiple hardware startups has compiled their hard-earned wisdom into a 300+ page guide to electronics design. Covering everything from ideation and component selection to schematic design, PCB layout, cost optimization, manufacturing, testing, lab setup, troubleshooting, demo tips, and recommended companies, this book aims to accelerate your learning and prevent common pitfalls. A free digital copy or a physical copy for $39 is available.

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(www.hscott.net)
Hardware electronics engineering startup lessons

Fiwix: A Lightweight, POSIX-Compliant Open-Source OS Kernel

2025-02-05

Fiwix is a lightweight, open-source operating system kernel based on the UNIX architecture and fully POSIX-compliant. With under 50K lines of code, it's designed for educational purposes and hobbyists. Built as a monolithic kernel in ANSI C for the i386 architecture, it boasts compatibility with a large base of existing GNU applications. FiwixOS, a distribution based on the Fiwix kernel, includes a GNU toolchain, libraries, and other open-source software. It uses Newlib as its standard C library and Ext2 as its primary filesystem. The developers encourage users to test, provide feedback, and contribute to improve Fiwix and FiwixOS.

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(www.fiwix.org)
Development OS Kernel

World's Craziest Video Wall: A Chromebook Frankenstein

2025-03-01

Two high school students embarked on a three-year odyssey to transform a fleet of discarded Chromebooks into the world's most unconventional video wall. Overcoming numerous software and hardware hurdles, including ChromeOS limitations, precise video synchronization challenges, and aging hardware compatibility issues, they created a custom Linux distro, a clever video syncing algorithm, and ingenious mounting hardware. Their project showcases ingenuity, resourcefulness, and the power of collaboration, turning e-waste into an impressive technological marvel.

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(varun.ch)
Hardware video wall

A Minimalist Ruby X11 Window Manager: rubywm

2025-01-31
A Minimalist Ruby X11 Window Manager: rubywm

Frustrated with existing window managers, the author created rubywm, a minimalist window manager written in under 1000 lines of pure Ruby (including the X11 driver). It supports tiling and floating window layouts but lacks window decorations and drag-and-resize functionality. All keyboard handling is delegated to external tools like sxhkd, and communication happens via X11 ClientMessage events. Currently, it only supports single monitors and is experimental, prone to crashing. The author's primary goal is personal use, not a large user base.

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(github.com)
Development

llama.cpp Integrates Qwen2VL Multimodal Model

2024-12-15
llama.cpp Integrates Qwen2VL Multimodal Model

The llama.cpp project on GitHub recently merged a pull request adding support for the Qwen2VL multimodal large language model. This model combines a large language model with a vision encoder, enabling processing of both images and text. Integration involves converting the model's LLM part and vision encoder into GGUF format and using a new command-line tool for inference. Future work includes adding support for more backends like MPS and Vulkan.

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(github.com)
AI multimodal

DockView: Zero-Dependency Docking Layout Manager for React, Vue, and TypeScript

2025-01-11
DockView: Zero-Dependency Docking Layout Manager for React, Vue, and TypeScript

DockView is a zero-dependency docking layout manager supporting tabs, groups, grids, and split views. It works with React, Vue, and vanilla TypeScript. Features include serialization/deserialization, theming, drag-and-drop, popout windows, floating groups, a comprehensive API, and high test coverage. Built with security in mind, DockView uses GitHub Actions for verified publishing and builds. It boasts excellent documentation and live examples, making it a powerful and easy-to-use layout management solution.

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(github.com)
Development Layout Manager

bookmarks.txt: A Simple, Text-Based Bookmark Manager

2025-08-28
bookmarks.txt: A Simple, Text-Based Bookmark Manager

bookmarks.txt offers a streamlined approach to bookmark management using plain text files. Bookmarked URLs are stored in files named bookmarks.txt, with a simple format: one URL per line, optionally including a title (space-separated). A global bookmarks file resides at $HOME/bookmarks.txt, while project-specific bookmarks can be stored in local bookmarks.txt files. The project includes a script, bin/bookmarks, for listing and adding bookmarks, but building custom tools is also encouraged. Combined with fzf, it provides a powerful fuzzy search and open functionality. This lightweight, customizable solution prioritizes simplicity and extensibility.

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(github.com)
Development bookmark management

Finnish Forest Exploitation Debate Archived Online

2025-02-26
Finnish Forest Exploitation Debate Archived Online

The National Library of Finland has archived years of online discussions surrounding the economic exploitation of Finnish forests. This extensive archive includes perspectives from conservationists and businesses, encompassing websites, articles, videos, and forum threads from various sources including news outlets, blogs, government agencies, forestry companies, researchers, and environmental organizations. The material covers topics ranging from carbon stock and biodiversity protection to economic utilization. Access is governed by Finnish copyright law and available at designated legal deposit libraries.

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(www.kansalliskirjasto.fi)
Tech forest resources online archive Finland

Archon: A GPT-5-Powered Copilot for Your Computer

2025-08-17
Archon: A GPT-5-Powered Copilot for Your Computer

Archon, a third-place winner at OpenAI's GPT-5 Hackathon, is a computer copilot controlled via natural language. It uses a hierarchical approach: GPT-5 plans actions, and a fine-tuned model, Archon-mini, executes them. Clever image processing and caching minimize cost and latency. Future development focuses on streaming control and self-learning, aiming for truly self-driving computer operation.

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(prava.co)
AI

Let's Encrypt Dropping TLS Client Authentication EKU

2025-05-18
Let's Encrypt Dropping TLS Client Authentication EKU

Let's Encrypt will remove the "TLS Client Authentication" Extended Key Usage (EKU) from its certificates starting in 2026. This primarily affects clients using Let's Encrypt certificates for server authentication. A phased rollout using ACME profiles will minimize disruption. Most website users won't need to take action. The change is driven by Google Chrome's root program requirements and the increasing suitability of private CAs for client authentication.

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(letsencrypt.org)
Tech Certificates

Rick Beato's Furious Rant Against Music Copyright: Killing Podcast Music?

2025-08-31
Rick Beato's Furious Rant Against Music Copyright: Killing Podcast Music?

Rick Beato, a music video podcaster with over 5 million subscribers, recently launched a scathing attack on record labels, particularly Universal Music Group, for their heavy-handed approach to copyright claims on podcast music snippets. Beato argues this stifles music promotion, harms artists, and violates fair use principles. He calls for the music industry to reform its outdated system, enabling fair use of music clips in podcasts to benefit both artists and podcasters. This echoes Saving Country Music's long-standing critique of the music copyright regime, highlighting a growing concern within the industry.

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(savingcountrymusic.com)
Misc music copyright podcasting
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